


Chasing the Rabbit

by shipshape_sheep



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst and Humor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Grumpiness and arguing, Jaeger robot stuff, M/M, Neural handshake wackiness, Post-Movie, Sad childhood memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-23
Packaged: 2017-12-20 10:21:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/886121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shipshape_sheep/pseuds/shipshape_sheep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt and Gottlieb take a defunct Jaeger out for a joyride, which is totally a good idea. They find things they didn't expect in the Drift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“This is the worst idea you have ever had.”

Gottlieb's voice echoed in the vast darkness of the hangar. Newt hastily motioned at him to hush, even though there was no one to hear them. The air smelled like wet concrete, cooling engines, years of sweat and grime. From far away, they could hear the sounds of the post-apocalypse party that was still raging hours after the war clock stopped—thumping bass and laughter, distorted and ghostly as it filtered into the huge, abandoned space.

All around them, shut-down Jaegars watched them like the statues of abandoned gods, stern and disapproving. Newt gazed up at them, forgetting himself for a moment. There was something tragic about them now. Their purpose was gone. They were defunct, extinct, bound to be dismantled or propped up in museums. 

“Ever,” Gottlieb went on, pitching his voice to a whisper that was somehow louder than his normal speaking voice. “I want you to understand the gravity of that statement. Really. This tops them all. The time you almost blinded me with Kaiju stomach acid back in university. The time you spent your half of the rent on those action figures.”

“This is totally going to be worth it.” Newt stopped in front of a boxy, last-gen Jaegar, gunmetal gray with red accents that had gone murky and faded with wear. He knocked on its giant foot and grinned at Gottlieb. Gottlieb scowled back at him. “This one. Tin Star. It may not look like much, but it's a classic. Besides, it's perfect for us because one pilot controls the leg steering pistons and the other controls the arms and weapons. One of those bisected neural networks from the old days. Remember when this guy took down Dolphintail? Man, that was a beautiful fight. Dolphintail had those sweet razor-sharp fins...”

“That's discounting your more recent terrible ideas. Drifting with a squashed monster brain and almost killing yourself, for instance. Do you have any idea how frightening it was to find you twitching and bleeding on the ground, Newton? I thought you were--”

“Don't tell you haven't dreamed of piloting one of these bad boys. Besides, we already know that we're...” Newt waggled his eyebrows and lowered his voice to a cheesy, seductive croon. “Drift compatible.”

“Dying a fiery death isn't really one of my dreams, no. It's rather low on the list.” Gottlieb tapped his cane on the concrete in a nervous, irritable rat-a-tat rhythm.

Newt bounced on his heels slightly, a sure sign he was fully invested in an idea and had no intentions of letting it go, no matter how ridiculous or potentially deadly. “Come on. It's not like we're going on a joyride. We'll just do the neural handshake thing and then, like, walk around in the hangar for a while.”

“The last time we...shook hands...I relived all my worst childhood memories and then vomited.”

“But it was kind of a rush, right?” 

Newt yanked down on a lever and engaged the emergency access hatch. There was a rusty groan—clearly, this particular Jaegar hadn't seen combat in quite a while. And now it never would again. A prickle went up Newt's spine as he stared up into the dark interior, as if he were looking into a tomb. He turned back to Gottlieb. His partner's face still looked haggard from the night's experiences: his normally slicked-down hair stuck up in wild quills, his dark eyes were pouchy, and his sweater vest had come untucked on one side. He was leaning pretty heavily on his cane, too. Clearly he had come off the adrenaline high Newt was still riding long ago. 

“Hey...” Newt said softly, rubbing the back of his neck. It was kind of unsettling to see the normally fastidious Gottlieb looking so run down. Newt knew he must look like a mess, too. He had traded his rain-damp, bloodstained button-up for a clean t-shirt and discarded his cracked glasses for his emergency pair (round tortoiseshell, not flattering,) but he was still nicked and bruised and worn out. “You know, we really don't have to do this. I'm serious. No pressure. I just figured, everybody else is celebrating, why don't we? I know I get carried away with stuff sometimes.”

Gottlieb narrowed his eyes. “Just walking around the hangar, is that correct?”

Newt shrugged, avoiding eye contact. Suddenly Tin Star seemed very large and very clunky and very liable to fall over and explode at any moment. “Yeah, I mean...forget it. You're right, this was a dumb idea. Let's just head back to the party and...”

“I suppose it could be fun.” Gottlieb said the word fun as if it was a potentially volatile chemical. His forehead creased the way it did when he was working out a seemingly impossible physics puzzle, the ones that always looked like a kid's scribbles on a chalkboard to Newt. Suddenly, Gottlieb shouldered past Newt, heading straight for the spiral ramp that led up into the cockpit. Newt stumbled backwards a step, blinking. “You know what? All right. We almost fried our brains for those bastards, might as well have a good time before our jobs officially become meaningless.”

“Uh...yeah!” Newt laughed, a little shakily. He hurried to catch up with Gottlieb, whose cane clanged determinedly against the steel walkway at a rapid beat. “Awesome. Great.”

The cockpit was dark and small and smelled like burnt wiring. For a moment Newt wondered if they would even be able to get the damn thing on without a technical operator, but Gottlieb was already busy at a control panel, flipping on glowing blue lights and filling the cramped space with a rolling electric hum.

“And you thought I wouldn't be up for this,” Gottlieb muttered. “I probably know these machines better than you do. You were always more preoccupied with the rampaging monster side of the equation.”

“Oh, yeah, watch out, mechanical genius over here,” Newt grumbled. He fiddled with the armor, trying to get it to open. “Hey, man, do you need any help into--”

He looked over. Gottlieb was already in his armor plating, his cane neatly wedged against the nearby corner where it wouldn't roll away. Normally Gottlieb looked like a miraculously de-aged old man in his frumpy sweaters and slacks and oxfords, but in the glowing titanium armor suit he looked kind of...badass. The sharp angles of his face, which usually made him look curmudgeonly and disapproving, looked intense and determined in the silvery glow of the holo-monitors.

“Just stand still,” Gottlieb said, rolling his eyes. “Stop fidgeting. It's trying to lock onto your biological signature.”

“Uh--” All of a sudden the armor plates clapped onto Newt's body with a whirring click that made him flinch. His eyelids twitched as the sensor current hummed around his body, tingling and sharp. “Oh, okay. Cool.”

“Counting down to neural handshake in ten...nine...” the automated female voice said, cool and collected as always.

“Remember the protocol, Newton,” Gottlieb said, his voice calm and professorial. Newt's heart was hammering painfully in his chest. A wonder it didn't clang against the titanium. “Go with the Drift. Don't hang on to anything. Just like before, all right?”

“Yeah.” The icy computerized voice kept counting down, steadily, inexorably. This didn't seem at all like the wacky jaunt Newt had intended.“Hey, Hermann, before this starts, can I just--”

A high-pitched buzz filled the tiny cockpit as a searing, blinding headache suddenly blazed between Newt's temples.

“One.”


	2. Chapter 2

They called it the Drift for a reason—that sudden, overwhelming sense of momentum, speed, weightlessness. Newt felt his teeth rattle, his veins sing with electricity, the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. He felt like every molecule in his body was flying apart. And then, abruptly, he felt nothing. He was numb. Disembodied. A ghost looking in through the window of memory.

He saw himself at five years old, hiding under his bed and playing with plastic dinosaurs. Somewhere outside the closed door, his mother was crying, trying to do it quietly so he wouldn't hear. The wallpaper in the room was a geometric pattern of overlapping blue circles, like the scales on a mermaid's tail.

Now he was watching the first successful Kaiju defeat on a battered diner television. It lay slumped on a rocky beach, leaking sapphire blood into the cold gray water, one fin still waving feebly. Everyone in the crowded restaurant was cheering, but teenage Newt felt only pain for the monster. So strange, so alien, dying so far away from home.

(“I can't find you, dude.” Newt's muted conscious mind grasped for any signal of Gottlieb's memories mingled with his own. Tiny flashes of Gottlieb's past—a crumpled paper crane, the view from a train window—passed by and then faded into nothing.)

Now the first time he met Gottlieb, back at that freezing Alaskan outpost, both of them gawky graduate students who had no idea how young they were. Snowflakes gathered on Gottlieb's eyelashes, on the heavy fur ruff of his parka. Stiff posture, polished spats (despite the snow,) snapping about how disorganized the slapped-together lab was even though both of them were basically unpaid interns. Newt thought he knew everything about his future partner the first time he laid eyes on him, but he couldn't have been more wrong.

Now he was examining his first Kaiju specimen up close, the enormous eye full of iridescent colors, opalescent blues and yellows and rose-pinks....

Now...the smooth, modulated computer voice rang through the drift, almost jarring Newt back to consciousness.

“Left hemisphere out of alignment.”

(“Come on, Hermann, where are you?”)

Newt tried to hold onto the blurry, fleeting memories. Gottlieb, maybe three of four, alone in the snow, wrapping a red scarf around the neck of a snowman. A few years later, Gottlieb by himself in an empty school library, the sunlight outside the high arch windows deepening to red-orange. A teenaged, gawky Gottlieb with spots on his chin getting his school knapsack knocked out of his arms, papers spilling across cracked tile. The bullies stomped on the papers, leaving dirty shoeprints. Gottlieb dropped gracelessly to the floor to gather up the torn pages.

(“That's over now,” Newt urged, feeling the memory drag at him like a desperate hand trying to pull him into the undertow. “Just dust in the wind, man. Let go. Don't hang on. Listen to me...focus on me, okay?”)

The memory began to dissolve. Now he saw Gottlieb at his present age. The cluttered lab, with its dusty bookshelves and faded chalkboard, crowded around them. Gottlieb's mouth was twisted into a grimace of pain and fear that made Newt's stomach ache. 

“Newton?” Gottlieb cried out, stumbling forward, almost tripping on a heap of rolled blueprints. Newt saw himself slumped on the ground, horribly still, the neural link device halfway slipped off his head. Blood streaked his face, trickled from his eyes and nose. His open eyes. His open, unseeing eyes...

Something was wrong here. Gottlieb lowered himself into a kneel and tried to gather the motionless Drift-Newt into his arms. Drift-Newt's head rolled bonelessly on his neck. The lights on the neural link helmet sputtered, went dark.

“You fool. You idiot.” Gottlieb sobbed as he wrapped his arms tighter around the lifeless body, burying his face against the crook of Drift-Newt's shoulder. “I'm too late. You'll never know...you'll never...”

The memory—the nightmare, the mental vision, whatever it was—would not go away. It was wrapped around the both of them like quicksand, holding them fast, dragging them down. Newt tried to go towards Gottlieb, tried to pull him away from the body, tried to prove to him that he was still alive. But, of course, he couldn't. Gottlieb's broken sobs echoed through the lab. It wasn't the sight of his own dead body that frightened Newt, but the raw sorrow on Gottlieb's face. The shattered expression of complete, wrenching loss.

The computerized voice echoed tinnily from somewhere a thousand miles above them. “Dangerous hemisphere imbalance detected. Disconnecting in five...four...”

(“Come on, man.” A broken, stunned thought that flew into the void and crumbled into silence. The memory was already beginning to fade, the lines going indistinct, the colors muddying into gray. “It's not real. Let it go. Come back to me, all right?”)

Consciousness was like being submerged in an ice bath. Newt came up the surface gasping. His eyes were stinging with tears. The armor clanged open and Newt struggled to regain his balance, to readjust to the steady, fixed world of reality. The first words out of his mouth were a panicked, “Are you okay?”

Gottlieb was still in his armor, but behind the glowing helmet shield, his eyes were closed and his mouth hung a fraction open. He appeared to be unconscious. Newt's heart hammered, his face broke out in cold sweat, his temples buzzed. “No, no, no, no...”

The words sounded very small in the cramped, shadowy quiet of the Jaegar.


	3. Chapter 3

There was a moment of total, agonizing silence. Newt sagged against the wall of the cockpit, staring at the motionless body of his friend, total helplessness running through his veins like ice water. Then Gottlieb's eyelids began to twitch and flutter. The armor plating unlocked one heavy metal clasp at a time. Gottlieb staggered out; he took one trembling step and then tumbled to the floor. Newt darted over, wrapped his arms around Gottlieb, pulled him into a sitting position.

“Talk to me, man,” Newt said hoarsely, pushing Gottlieb's hair back from his sweat-damp forehead.

“Your lack of respect for personal space...” Gottlieb's voice was cracked and wavering. “Is staggering.”

Newt didn't hear him. He immediately pressed his forehead to Gottlieb's, then squeezed him in a tight hug, burying his face against the crook of Gottlieb's shoulder. Gottlieb smelled like sweat, burnt ozone, and chalk dust. He didn't hug Newt back. “Oh my god. I thought your brain was fried. You scared the hell out of me.”

“They say the first drift Jaegar pilots share can be overwhelming.” Gottlieb gently pushed away Newt, then looked him up and down with disapproval. He tugged Newt's t-shirt down where it had become pulled up, exposing a colorfully tattooed hip, and pushed Newt's glasses back to their proper position on his nose. “I just thought I had a little more self-control.”

They sat huddled next to each other on the floor of the cockpit, sharing an uneasy silence for what seemed like several painful minutes.

“It got pretty real in there.” Newt watched his partner anxiously. There were bruised hollows under Gottlieb's eyes and a tense, hunched set to his shoulders. He didn't seem willing, or even able, to look at Newt directly. “I mean...what was that, man? Finding me dead on the floor of the lab...”

“The Drift doesn't reveal memories only. It includes whatever is most dominant in the subconscious.” Gottlieb stared at the scuffed metal floor. “Dreams. Fears. Whatever the mind is hiding, it gets dragged to the surface.”

Newt felt a sudden rush of heat to his face. Shame. The tips of his ears burned. “Finding me like that really shook you up, didn't it?”

Now, finally, Gottlieb looked at him, whirling around, eyes bright with anger and fresh tears. His voice was sharp and piercing, but also choked with emotion in a way that Newt had never heard before. “Yes, yes it did. It terrified me. You can't just do whatever you want, Newton, and expect no one to get hurt. I was so afraid for you. Your actions have consequences, do you understand that at all?”

Newt swallowed, shrunk in on himself. Of course he knew. He could see the consequences in front of him right now, in the form of Gottlieb's tear-streaked, crumpled face. “Yeah. Yeah, I understand.”

Shakily, Newt got to his feet. Gottlieb was hunched over into a defensive crouch, his face aimed at the corner. Better to just get out and not screw things up even more thoroughly. He took a step towards the exit hatch.

“Don't go.” Gottlieb sighed. “I don't want you to leave. That's not what I meant.”

Newt sat down again, gingerly. “Okay.” The Jaegar felt too small, too intimate. There was nowhere to hide in such cramped quarters. Newt felt every breath Gottlieb took, knew exactly how fast his heart was beating.

“You want to know what I was talking about, don't you.” Gottlieb's voice was careful. He was trying very hard to keep it steady. “When I said, 'You'll never know.'”

Newt closed his eyes. The after effects of the Drift still coursed through his brain like a weak electrical current, muted flashes, fits and starts. He still felt everything Gottlieb felt—the years of bottled-up misery, the frustration, the loneliness. “I kind of already know, dude. You can't really hide that kind of thing in the Drift.”

Gottlieb gave a bitter little laugh. “I was afraid of that.”

“Then you probably already know I have the same...feelings.” Newt wanted to punch himself in the face. His voice was cracking like a teenager's and his palms were sweating. He wanted to scream with frustration or possibly burst into song. He wanted a lot of things, but what he wanted most was for Gottlieb to stop staring off into the dark abyss of his soul or whatever and look at him, damn it. “This is so stupid. Why don't we do anything about it?”

Gottlieb waved his hands in the air, his voice poisonous with sarcasm. “Why _don't_ we do anything about it?”

“Well? Why don't we?”

He curled his hand in the fabric of Gottlieb's rumpled sweatervest, pulled him close, and kissed him full on the mouth. It was a decision he almost immediately regretted. Gottlieb did not kiss him back. He made a strangled, squawking noise of surprise and pulled away, eyes goggling, mouth still half open.

“That didn't happen,” Newt gasped out breathlessly. “Just forget the whole--”

Newt was pressed up against the wall before he knew it, cold metal rivets pressing into his back, Gottlieb's hands grasping his shoulders. Gottlieb's mouth was warm and bittersweet. His fingers kneaded at Newt's shoulders, then one hand slipped up and tangled into his hair, pulling gently. Newt began to return the kiss, clumsy and awkward, tongues colliding. Gottlieb, as if correcting this, pressed Newt more firmly against the wall and gently caught his lower lip between his teeth.

“You've thought about this,” Newt said, stunned, turning his head to catch his breath. “What was it? The tats? The leather jacket?”

“So much for self control,” Gottlieb muttered to himself as he smoothed his other hand under Newt's t-shirt.

“You're...really good at this. Seriously. Wow. I never would have figured--” Gottlieb's thumb traced his bare collarbone. “Okay, I'll shut up. Carry on.”

“I want to try again,” Gottlieb murmured against the side of Newt's neck.

Newt exhaled. He could feel Gottlieb's heartbeat against his chest, feel the heat of his body, feel the slight callouses on Gottlieb's palms against his chest, the back of his neck. “I think this is a really good try already,” he managed to get out.

“The Jaeger.” Gottlieb pulled away, a strange half-smile quirking in the corner of his mouth. “I want to pilot the Jaeger.”


	4. Chapter 4

A muted electrical hum buzzed in Newt's ears as the armor current began to course around his body. For the second time that night, the automated voice began its steady countdown. “Neural handshake initiating in ten...nine...”

This time, however, Newt didn't feel like the numbers were counting down towards certain doom. A sense of weightlessness rose in his chest and a smile began to flicker at the corners of his mouth.

“You ready to rock this?”

“I am very much ready to rock, thank you.” The humming began to intensify to a pitch so high it was almost inaudible. Newt tried to catch a glimpse of Gottlieb's face, but he couldn't make out anything in the harsh blue glow of the helmet. The Jaegar was starting to wake up around them, pistons working, servos whirring. All around them was the thunderstorm smell of crackling energy.

“Sure about that? Because we could always, you know, keep going with that other thing...”

There was a slyness in Gottlieb's voice that made Newt forget the roar of the superpowered reactor and blush like a teenager. “Focus, Newton.”

The Drift was faster this time, cleaner. No starts and stops in the slipstream of memory. Just images that flowed into each other like water, one after the other. Newt at six, his mother guiding his small fingers to the correct strings on an acoustic guitar. Gottlieb at eight, letting an iridescent beetle crawl onto the sleeve of his school uniform, laughing when it fluttered its jewel-shiny wings. Newt leaning against the wall at a school dance, trying desperately to look casual. Gottlieb winning an award for exceptional scholarly merit, his smile beautifully shy.

Now Newt was passed out on Gottlieb's dormitory couch, snoring as Gottlieb pulled a worn chenille blanket over his curled-in body. Newt and Gottlieb the first and only time they visited a bar together, cramped in a tiny faux-leather booth—Newt excitedly explaining every single tattoo on his arms, Gottlieb nodding off into his half-finished tumbler of whiskey. Newt and Gottlieb drifting with the Kaiju together. Kissing on the cold metal floor of the Jaegar, Gottlieb's long fingers sliding through Newt's hair...

The cool, collected voice snapped them both back to reality. “Neural link successfully established.”

“Holy shit, dude,” Newt said, his voice shaky with laughter.

Gottlieb experimented with flexing Tin Star's enormous arms. A proximity alarm trilled as he almost smashed into some scaffolding. “Well put.”

“Let's test this puppy out, shall we?” Newt pumped his legs up and down with as much force as he could muster, fighting against the heavy armor. Tin Star began to march forward, its footsteps huge and exaggerated. It almost toppled over—Gottlieb stretched out the arms instinctively, but Newt managed to right the machine.

“Trust the Jaegar,” Gottlieb corrected gently as Newt managed to realign Tin Star to a relatively even keel. “It knows which way you want to go.” 

“Okay.” Newt guided the Jaegar forward more smoothly now, making it stroll into the open area of the hangar. “This is awesome, man. I feel really...tall in this thing.”

“But you're going the wrong way,” Gottlieb interjected, swinging the massive arms in the opposite direction. “And much too slowly, I might add.”

Tin Star halted and wobbled for a moment as Newt tried to reconnect with Gottlieb's thought process. “Wrong way? What--”

“We'll miss the sunrise.”

Newt felt the shared neural link guiding his legs in the right direction. The enormous Jaegar finally began to stumble into graceful rhythm as it made its way towards the port. The aftereffects of the Drift were still buzzing around in Newt's brain, like blurts of static. He felt Gottlieb's childhood loneliness, his quiet adolescent sadness, his triumph when he watched the war clock stop. He knew every heartbreak, minor and major, knew every daydream and idea, knew the name of the beta fish he raised a kid and the name of his first kiss. He knew exactly, in intimate detail, how Gottlieb felt as he leaned in to press his mouth against Newt's collarbone, the excitement and nervousness and years of waiting. 

It was a funny thing, this total transparency, this intimacy where there were no spaces for secrets to hide. Newt thought it would be terrifying to have every childhood embarrassment and every stupid mistake and every dirty thought exposed and illuminated, but instead it was freeing. Comforting. There were no more misheard signals, messages unsent. They knew each other now. 

The hangar port jutted out over a rocky stretch of seaside cliffs. The sky was pale and colorless, horizon blurring into a faded gray ocean. After a long night of rain and thunder and fire, the water was calm, still as glass. No monsters would ever burst out that water again. Tin Star stood on the battered asphalt without moving as its two pilots looked out over the ocean, seaspray speckling its titanium plates with beads of water.

“I want to try something,” Gottlieb said quietly. He propelled the Jaegar's arms forward as if pushing against a gigantic invisible wall. Rockets launched out of holsters in the wrists and spiraled into the clear pre-dawn sky. They exploded in splashes of colorful light, blinding white and electric blue and brilliant orange. A flock of seagulls nesting on the rocks flapped into the air, squawking. “Stun flares. Think of them as fireworks.”

Newt grinned. “We're going to get in so much trouble.” The last sparks of multicolored light faded as they sank into the water. 

“What was it you said? Fortune favors the brave.”

The first rays of sunlight turned the edge of the ocean from steel-gray to silver.


End file.
